Augmenting media with haptic feedback can create an immersive user experience. For example, explosions in a movie or video game or deep base in a song may be accompanied by haptic feedback that enhances the media experience. The haptic feedback can be specified by control tracks that are manually authored (e.g., designed by a person) or automatically generated (e.g., by a processing device). However, each of these techniques has benefits and drawbacks.
Manually authored control tracks may facilitate customized haptic feedback that is authored by a person and therefore may represent a more meaningful, visceral, representation of media content. However, manually authoring control tracks is a time consuming process. Manually-authored control tracks are typically generated for particular media content such as a specific movie and therefore are not suitable for use with other media content such as a different movie. As such, a control track that is manually authored for a given media content may not be applied to other media content. Furthermore, such manually-authored control tracks are typically designed for use with specialized haptic output systems such as a chair having multiple and different types of haptic output devices that can swivel the chair, move the chair up and down, etc. As such, the control tracks may therefore be incompatible with other types and/or number of haptic output devices such as those found on, among others, mobile communication devices.
Conventional automated systems may provide haptic feedback that is determined based on a computational analysis of the media content. Such systems may provide a cost effective and fast solution to provide haptic feedback to augment media content. However, these conventional systems may not provide compelling haptic feedback for all types of media content and may not provide a quality of haptic feedback compared to manually-authored control tracks that specify the haptic feedback. Furthermore, automatically generated control tracks may be incompatible with certain types of haptic output devices. These and other problems exist.